ASTP Musical

by Raymond G. Fox

Visit the Take It Easy Web Site to learn more about this Swing Musical www.takeiteasy.org

Take It Easy deals with a seldom recounted period of World War II history when over 200,000 of our army inductees were enlisted in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). The ASTP was in operation from 1942-1944 on many college campuses, and was part of the lives not only of the ASTP soldiers, but also of their families and their sweethearts or friends who were among the undergraduate coeds enrolled at the same time. The story is about young men who were taken from their college campuses to find themselves on other college campuses, in uniform. It is also about the girls who saw their boyfriends leave to go to war, and shortly thereafter, were presented with a new crop of young men to console them, if only temporarily. As was the case with some ASTP units, they were abruptly disbanded to provide front line ground troops, which many times resulted in tragic casualties.

Take It Easy is a musical set on a college campus in World War II, which follows the lives of three privates drafted out of their Ivy League colleges and into the ASTP at State University. Here, in old fashioned musical tradition, boys meet coeds and love blooms. Like the movies of the '40s Take It Easy is filled with innocent youth, pure love, and winning the war. Rich with "new" hummable tunes done in '40s style, Take It Easy gives its audience a chance to relax into a colorful era when the lines of right and wrong, good and evil were more clearly drawn.

Private John Graham forgets the girl back home when he meets Mary Taylor, the girl of his dreams and daughter of State University's dorm mother. Private Fred Brown, who thinks he has a way with girls, is put in his place by Susan Bradshaw, "fast" girl on campus. Private Joe Goldman, though anxious to get into the war, falls in love with Becky Winters, a girl who has learned to be smart by playing dumb. Mrs. Taylor's secret life is revealed when her old flame, Lt. Col. Robert Davidson, shows up on campus in charge of the ASTP unit there.

When the unit is disbanded and sent to fight in the European theater, the coeds keep the home fires burning, worry, and help the farmers harvest their crops. Each boy returns from battle, older, wiser, changed and ready to pick up life anew.

The objectives in the plot and the character delineation are to move the songs along and bring nostalgia to the fore. Take It Easy is not intended as a complex study of a time, but only a remembrance of the way things were; an evocation of another period in American history. By using familiar archetypes, a simple story line, and accessible melodies, the play succeeds in doing this.

Pat Kearney (ASTP/College of Puget Sound and ASTP Web Site Editor) with the "enlisted" cast members of the ASTP musical, Take It Easy, at the Judith Anderson Theatre in New York City, May 18, 1996.